


Hiding

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Sex, Angst, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Invasion of Privacy, Secrets, Shapeshifting, Spies & Secret Agents, Touching, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1994-12-12
Updated: 1994-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-03 10:05:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After discovering that Kira has been concealing her past from him, Odo feels compelled to check up on her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hiding

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written and is set shortly after "Necessary Evil." The original version appeared in _Deep Spaces_. I wrote it for Kimberley Junius.

The textures were different than he had expected them to be. While the pillow sat stiffly under him, the fabric of the sheet lay cool and surprisingly pliant in unstraightened swirls left by the body which had lain there that morning. He hoped that he was not too soft; he found that while he could often mimic a material's appearance perfectly, replicating its physical properties proved more difficult. He wondered how much warmer the sheet felt just after it wrapped around her body, and whether someone might find that it smelled like her--he could not smell it himself. But such questions only made him envy those who already knew. Remembering that he was a trespasser, he tried to order himself to leave. But the muddled instinct which had drawn him made him linger, and then the door swished open.

From his vantage point on her bed, he watched her enter her quarters exhausted. He supposed it had been one of the worse days she had spent on DS9--at least, one of the worst since the station had become DS9--but she must have spent far too much of that particular day remembering the time before the Cardassians had been driven from Bajor, when the station had a different name and a different commander. She looked like she might collapse on the bed, in full uniform, and simply fall asleep. He wondered if perhaps she wanted to cry, but quickly dismissed the notion; she was not the kind of woman to give in to the luxury of bawling just because she'd had a bad day. On the contrary, she was stronger than he--pretending to be checking up on her as though he hadn't crept into her quarters for his own purposes--which he still wouldn't let himself think about.

She did collapse on the bed, partway on top of him--though not before throwing her tunic on the floor, kicking her boots halfway across the room, wriggling out of her pants, and uttering a Bajoran profanity when she commanded the computer to lower the lights. But it was warm in the room, so she kicked him down around her knees. Well, he thought, it was what he deserved. A tiny piece of himself, like a loose thread, crept slowly up her leg, but she carelessly brushed him away. When her breathing became slower and more regular, he began to slide away, molecule by molecule.

Something pulled and stretched him painfully for a moment: her fingers. Abruptly, she had grabbed him and pulled him high across her back, wrapping him around to clutch against her chest. The moment he realized what she was doing, he gave up resistance, but she hesitated for a moment, looking down with a momentary expression of...confusion? suspicion? Perhaps she merely realized that her regular blanket had been changed and wondered what was wrong with the processors. A moment later, she curled up with him pressed against her belly, folded between her chest and legs. He rubbed against most of her body, the faint perspiration on her thighs and under her breasts, the soft material of her underclothes and the fabric crosses in the shirt she often wore under her tunic. Through her panties he could feel the crushed curls of her hair and more dampness. But instead of feeling intimate with her, he despised his foolish intrusion: he wasn't going to erase the distance between them merely by pressing against her flesh.

He tried not to think about what he would do if she woke before he was completely unraveled from her. He imagined her hand seizing him forcefully, her present stillness signifying not sleep but the stealth she had learned during the Occupation. If she cut hard enough, quickly enough, she would be able to see that the fabric did not rip but dissolved away from a blade. Undoubtedly she would gasp and recoil as he metamorphosed--humanoids almost always did--as he turned fluid and grew, took on the shape of a man.

And then what was he going to say? "I'm sorry"? He had heard her respond to feeble apologies from incompetent station workers, he knew what she would say: "Somehow I don't think that's going to cover it...Constable." He supposed he would have to offer to resign as security chief--or perhaps arrest himself.

There was also the possibility, however remote, that she would respond differently to finding him in her bed...but that line of thought frightened him more than the other. Mora had brought him Bajoran prostitutes, probably thinking he was doing the shapeshifter a favor. Sometimes two or three scientists came in to observe. The women were usually revolted, often ridiculing him aloud, offering advice which he heeded as best he could. In his first days on Terok Nor he had even performed with Dabo girls for the Cardassians, doing neck tricks not even Quark could have imagined. He had grown as many arms as a Medusan, one each tying hands and feet together, one in each armpit and on each nipple, one between a pair of legs with a digit wriggling in each hole. A group of young Cardassians once persuaded him to transform into a female; he was never certain whether their disgusted laughter signified that he did not get the anatomy quite right, or that he did.

By that time he had become quite skilled at ascertaining when he should alter his size or shape to make his partner more comfortable, when he should change the tempo of his thrusting to please an audience. While such experiences with women were no more offensive than changing into an animal or turning his arms into knives, they left him empty as when he fled Mora's lab. Such encounters only served to remind himself and others that it was not merely eating and sleeping which he could not do as they did. At best, he eked out sympathy from nonconformists like Lwaxana Troi; at worst, he triggered the irrational hatred sparked throughout humanoid cultures by difference.

Which left him here, alone, despite the woman he lay with. Whatever he had come seeking this night, it was not that. He wanted no further proof that regardless of appearances, he would never be like her, would never feel what she could--which surely meant that she could never feel it with him. She would fall in love with that stiff-necked Vedek or another of her own people, even a Starfleet officer, and eventually, inevitably, she would go.

He did not realize until her eyes popped open that he had been moving: the last thought had been so intolerable to him that it affected him physically. An instinct he did not even know he had possessed him. He wrapped himself tightly around her, and transformed.

For one instant he surrounded her entirely, barely giving her room to breathe, allowing her limbs freedom of movement but not leaving a cell uncovered. He rimmed her ears and nostrils and every tiny crevice. The liquid form ran under her clothing and through her hair, caressing and stimulating. Goosebumps rose all over her skin, tickling him, as her breathing quickened, nipples hardened and muscles twitched. Sweat broke out under her arms and between her legs and rubbed into him like balm. She moaned.

In that instant, when she was too surprised to react consciously, he discovered precisely what her body craved, where a touch could send a pulse of pleasure through her. He pressed into her as far as he dared, memorizing the shape and the heat and the feel, not merely embracing but encompassing her until there was no place they did not touch. For an obliterating moment, he could not tell where he left off and she began: her pleasure was his, although it diffused through his system while he suspected that she felt it far more specifically in certain parts of her anatomy, her arching back, trembling legs, mouth rounded and open, sex soft and pliant. Her pounding blood reverberated throughout him, but she moved to another rhythm, less regular than her heartbeat, contracting her muscles, drawing him inside her. He thought that in another moment he would dissolve into her and become a permanent part of her body.

Then he realized that her skin was changing, too; the tingling he felt all over was not merely excitement but a chemical reaction, which he supposed had something to do with how his species reproduced...or perhaps merely with how they made love. She shuddered, still writhing in the throes of pleasure. He quickly released her, resolidifying in a heap around her waist. She was shaking, trying to catch her breath; by the time she ordered the lights on, he was as innocuous as he had been when she first entered the room. "Odo?" she whispered, her voice fluttering uncertainly. But he remained still, and eventually she lay back, muttering, "This place has finally cracked me up." She pulled him up around her ears, as if to keep intruders out, and finally fell into a deep sleep. Her lips fell open, her hands unclenched. Slowly he slid himself off her, reforming into his human persona beside the bed, pulling the blanket he had supplanted from underneath the mattress and covering her before he oozed through a vent and crept back to his office.

He was observing a transaction between Quark and Morn the next morning when she found him. "I was wondering if you wanted to join me for breakfast," she said.

He pretended to look at her in surprise. "Breakfast?" he asked. "You know I don't eat."

"I know, but I seem to remember you once telling me a pretty girl like me shouldn't eat alone." She had a serious expression which looked as though she would say more, but didn't.

"I remember," he said.

As they crossed the Promenade, he wondered what she thought she remembered. She remained unusually quiet, which could have meant that she knew too much, but might only reflect the strain of the last few days, the incidents which had caused her to remember his first words to her. Ironic, he thought, that he had used such a cliched phrase of romantic intent, although he had meant nothing by it at the time. He slowed, walking behind her, regarding her stiff-shouldered posture which was so different than her sleeping form. She turned suddenly and caught him looking.

"What?" she demanded rather sharply.

He dropped what passed for his eyes to the floor, in the manner he had studied under Dukat for so long; of course he could still see her. "You look...as though you didn't sleep well," he finally ventured.

Her look was curious, half-amused, as though she had a response on the tip of her tongue but didn't know whether or not to use it. "Well," she said slowly, "I had the strangest dream last night."


End file.
